... like sitting around with friends, drinking beer, eating tortilla chips and salsa and BBQ chicken, playing RPGs and dominoes, and watching Doctor Who.
Thompson to Vet Judges for McCain - HUMAN EVENTS I thought Fred Thompson crawled back into his den and went back to sleep. But evidently now he's John McCain's best friend, and the commenters at the site are tickled red.
Returned To The Battlefield When Justice Scalia said that the habeas case would mean more Americans would die, and that there were thirty cases at least of released Gitmo detainees who'd made their way back to the battlefield ... what's the truth behind those numbers. Answer: not a whole hell of a lot.
When The King Travels I acknowledge that the President needs a certain degree of security, and I certainly want him to be able to travel. But delaying traffic at Heathrow for hours? Dozens of flights cancelled? Jeez, talk about the Ugly American.
I am just endlessly amused by the comments people have about D&D 4e in the Player Handbookreviews on Amazon.
Now that it is here and I have had a chance to peruse the books for myself I have one feeling about them. Utter disgust. This takes the legacy of D&D and spits on it's grave.
If a system like 3.5 is to complex for you then take up trading card games because they are about at the same level as this drivel.
IT IS TWINK GAMING.
I'm so sad. AND NOTICE!!! THERE ARE ALREADY USED BOOKS AVAILABLE!! THAT SHOULD TELL YOU SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The biggest part of the game is tactically positioning yourself and your enemies. You hit them, get to shift one square and slide them 4 squares. It's just about planning our where people end up. Where's the imagination in that?
This edition of D&D is nothing but a MMORPG/Video game simulation for the table top with none of the benefits and all of the work.
Having been a player since 1979 I refuse to accept this as the game I fell in love with so long ago. It is like waking up in bed next to a stranger.
This game is terrible. I wonder if the game designers even liked D&D when they made this pile of dung?
I can't adequately express my disappointment with the new edition rules. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?! In many ways, it is unrecognizable from previous editions, and rather than a logical evolution (can you say ver 3.75?), it has devolved into something I can no longer associate with the game Gygax invented.
I bought it and played it a few times. It's not D&D, more like supers in a fantasy setting.
This is titled Betrayal because that is what WOTC have done to those people that supported this game for the last 35 years. I'm not happy. The only thing I can think that will make me happy is to see everyone responsible for this dribble to be tied up naked and smeared with fire ants.
I have seen every incarnation of the game, and this is the worst ever. From what I can tell this is a poorly executed attempt to lure new players from the very successful online gaming communities.
I miss the nights of our rule lawyer DM and the insane amount of details in our campaings, which will no longer will be the case for me or anyone else for that matter because of the damage this edition has caused. 4th edition has basically reduced the game to a watered-down user freindly "lazy mans" table top battle game ala Hero Clicks of even simply checkers.
Why not re-color the Mona Lisa with big bright crayons?
I've been playing D&D for a long time and this is the worst, most horribly butchered edition of the game I have ever seen. Thank god Gary Gigax is no longer alive to see what they did to his creation.
[I]s like playing a boardgame, it forced you to use miniatures, when i set up a game with this my players freak out! they where screming what the hell is this thing, this is not our beloved dnd it just another rpg with the same name.
The advantage of D&D and the D20 game system in general is that everybody knows it. There's no huge learning curve needed to just start playing the game. Every previous edition of D&D has understood this basic strength. Fourth Edition, plain and simple, is not D&D, and is not the D20 system. It's an entirely new game.
I don't like what I've seen and read because I don't feel like I can tell a good story with this rules set.
I can't believe this, but this game has actually managed to depress me!!
I guess we've 'returned to our roots'... so why do I feel like we climbed back into the primordial ooze?!
Worst D&D version ever. It is but a shell of what D&D once was and is now the shattered remnants of something that was grand. Rest in peace D&D. Quite possibly the worst rpg I have ever played.
Now my friend bought the book cause I refuse to buy it..and thank God I didn't. I saw it, I read it and was the WORSE game rules creation put together.
I prefer to have my eyes taped opened and force to see Sex and the City then roleplay 4.0 once more.
To continue the WoW references, 4th edition made me want to /wrists. The skill system is beyond simplistic. +5, or take a feat. /vomit.
If you've ever played D&D before, stay away from this edition! I didn't like a single change that they made to the game.
This game is cheese and stupidly rolled up in a videogame style burrito and served with an extra portion of combat, hold the role-playing.
4th edition is all about POWER. PCs are bassically gods!!!
Gone is the incredible detail of characters that is the trademark of DND and in place is now AT WILL POWERS...or more simply...DND for Dummies.
(I hasten to point out that the current review scores are almost evenly bimodal (as Margie classifies it), i.e., there are lots of folks giving it 1 star, and just as many giving it 5. I'm only cherry-picking the bad comments because they're ... well, so funny.)
There's actually some interesting analysis in quite a few of the reviews (both pro and con). But the vitriol of some of the posts -- generally the really short ones -- is as breathtaking as it is wildly misguided (I haven't seen anything in 4e that makes it any less suited to role-playing than 3 or 3.5 ... and, in fact, hear of some indications to the contrary).
I didn't really like the smaller lizard thingies [kobolds]. Because they dodged you every time.
It felt like everybody had -- it was like they were making a WebKin, that's how long it seems each player took.
I like my character, how she sneaks around. I think that's really me.
I like setting traps for people, except the bummer is I can't do it in battle. Junk shop? Real good stuff there.
Going to want to play some more?
Yeah!
Though, as more of a video gamer, she opined that her current online RPG, Adventure Quest, is more fun, because it's "faster." (And has its own Wikipedia page.)
In reading through the bi-modal reviews of D&D 4e on Amazon, it's clear that there's one fundamental element that is provoking a large degree of contention.
In the interest of game balance between the classes, and simplifying things, WotC has redesigned the combat system so that everything -- melee, missile, and spells -- are essentially "powers" with different ranges. There's a common mechanic (roll D20 plus modifiers vs. a resisting value, which might be AD or one of the "save" attributes) for everything, and the results are generally speaking XdY + Z damage of a particular type.
So that sounds pretty straightforward, right, and even desireable -- you can easily balance various powers/attacks between the classes, and not have to treat spells as something fundamentally different from swords. A Magic Missile can be handled by the mechanic as a Spear.
Some people thing this is spiffy-doodle, and they have good cause for it. Looking at a host of both tabletop games (GURPS come to mind) and online games (I'll include CoX here), it's clear that this approach makes things both a lot simpler to play and to run and to design around. A fundamentally sound system makes for a stronger game.
But some folks object to this very thing, and they have a good cause, too. A system where a Magic Missile and a Fire Spear and a Lightning Bolt and a Crossbow all basically do the same thing, just with (meaningless?) special effects makes things more like ... well, a video game, and loses a lot of the interesting flavor that makes D&D fun.
I've seen this before in different systems. Back in the Dark Ages, when I was running a supers game using Mayfair's DC Heroes system, I admired the integration and scalability of the system -- but it bugged the heck out of me that, really truly, there was no difference between someone attacking an opponent with a fire blast, an ice blast, an electrical blast, a force blast, a psychic blast, etc.
The question then becomes whether there is, in fact, a difference in those different damage types. In, for example, CoX, the difference come into play in two ways: pretty special effects (ooooh ... aaaaah ...) and differences in how defenders actually react to things -- some folks resist fire better than cold, or energy better than lethal damage, etc. Most power groups do different sorts of side effects, too -- psychic reducing damage, electricity reducing endurance, cold causing slowing, etc.
It's not clear to me, as yet, the extent to which D&D does this. How many different critters resist different damage types differently. Are there, or should there, be side effects of different attack types? As a magic-user I could see that damage was described in different types, but I don't recall much specifically done with those types. (My Ray of Cold did do a Slow, but my Magic Missile and various Fire attacks didn't seem to have any secondary effects.)
If the attack type doesn't make any real difference (or only in rare cases) except for folks drawing pictures of the combat, then I agree that they system has been over-simplified. If I simply haven't seen it yet (altogether possible -- two encounters in a sample scenario with pregen characters is hardly a fair assessment), then I withhold judgment.
(I'll note, though, that even online games aren't immune to this sort of criticism. CoX has been going through some "normalizing" of powers at different levels -- e.g., so that different types of scrappers get roughly the same sort of power/damage throughput at different levels, and some folks still object because their favorite set isn't as cool or distinct any more.)
So I'm not sure how fair a criticism it is -- it certainly has the potential to be a problem, but it should be possible to streamline and rationalize the conflict/damage system without adding a lot of specialized cruft and "exceptions" that overly slow things down. A happy balance between flavor and function.
Doyce ran Kate, Margie, Katherine (!), Jackie and me through a few encounters in a beginning "intro" scenario using the D&D 4e rules. Thoughts:
It's basically still D&D. Yeah, there are some odd trope changes, and the rules have been simplified and "game"ified a bit, but it's still clearly D&D (and I say that as someone whose played multiple editions of same).
The intro scenario is challenging largely because some of the biggest challenges in the rules -- understanding movement and combat sequence -- are vastly complicated by outdoor battles and shifty kobolds.
Mages (at a low level) are much simpler (and fun) to play. Thieves are much more tactically complicated (and powerful).
The changes into "at will" and "each encounter" and "daily" powers -- including spells -- is a nice re-engineering, IMO.
The game, to the level we've gone to, remains combat-centric and crunchy, really requiring use of miniatures (though still abstract enough to avoid use of facing).
The interactions between different powers -- for each of the characters, and between them -- was interestingly exception-driven and (for all that the overall rules structure has been simplified) complicated. In some ways, sort of like playing Cosmic Encounter, where every action influences everything else in sometimes unexpected ways.
Everyone, every class got a chance to shine in the intro.
Overall (and I'm sure I'll be pondering this a bit more until I play again) a good time. Glad to have played, look forward to more.
I attack ... the Darkness ... by replacing the oven bulb!
Cookbooks are a lot like Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. They contain seemingly rigid rules that, in practice, require a certain amount of adaptation for your own tastes.
Posted: 12:15 a.m. by LordOrcus I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version.
I'm trying an experiment with the "Unblogged Bits" Google Reader Shared yadda-yadda that I've been displaying in the sidebar. I really like the convenience (esp. at the office) of being able to just click on something in Google Reader and have it show up in the sidebar. But despite having set up an RSS feed for these items, I suspect that most of my readers never see them -- either because they fade into the sidebar, or else don't show up in the main feed from my site -- or get a chance to comment on them. Which is a shame.
So I'm experimenting with ways to easily get from the "Unblogged Bits" into real posts that folks can comment on, etc. Today's attempt: cut and paste from the sidebar.
First off: was a religious student in a philosophy class harrassed and threatened with a failing grade because she wouldn't renounce her faith? Or was she not doing well because she wouldn't expose her beliefs to critical thinking?:
I used to get seriously harassed by my fellow desktop gamers for my sound-alike elvish names, even though I used actual meaningful Tolkienesque morphemes:
Finally -- all sorts of brouhaha over a gay marriage in the Church of England. Except it wasn't a marriage, it wasn't something that hasn't happened before, and the folks who are kvetching loudest about it seem to have something else on their agenda.
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